Higgs en route for CERN

Yesterday the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail reported that five leading physicists have been invited to CERN for the Higgs search update on Wednesday. Peter Higgs is one of those called to the press conference so the five physicists could be the five living Higgs founders who were honoured with the Sakurai prize in 2010 i.e. Englert, Higgs, Kibble, Guralnik and Hagen. Kibble confirmed that he was called but is unable to make it and told the Sunday Times ‘My guess is that is must be a pretty positive result for them to be asking us out there.’

Frank Close on twitter has indicated that it was not five physicists and that they were not so much invited as “welcomed to attend”. He should know because he just tweeted this picture of himself with Higgs waiting at Palermo airport for a plane to Geneva.

Close is well-known for his own contributions to particle physics as well as classic text books and his popular book The Infinity Puzzle about the history of the standard model and the LHC.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2012 at 10:51 am and is filed under Higgs Hunting, Large Hadron Collider. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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7 Responses to Higgs en route for CERN

I am happy for Peter Higgs (and all other five theorists) for successfully unveiling the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking.

But the big question in everyone’s mind now is what the future will hold for HEP. Are we near a “nightmare scenario” where there will be no sign for BSM? What will happen to all the challenges that SM leave unexplained?

I invite all commenters to weigh in their opinions. It certainly is an intriguing topic to debate…

Even in the worst case where a perfect match for the Higgs boson is found and nothing else appears at the LHC in the next few years, all is not lost. There are all those other puzzles to solve and we would know they had to be solved without new physics up to about 3 TeV. It’s quite a constrained problem which might mean there are only a few solutions to think about.

“It’s quite a constrained problem which might mean there are only a few solutions to think about.”

The mere fact that the space of possible solutions is severely constrained does not mean that these solutions are “trivial” to find. For example, understanding the (possible) symmetry responsible for protecting the Higgs scalar (without evidence for BSM physics) may require a radical change in perspective.

[…] their latest data together, which resulted in the announcement of a 2.9 sigma signal today. More historical announcements, however, will probably be made at a CERN press conference on the 4th and some […]